“Unacceptable. There has to be a way.”
“Not that I’ve found.” There was a curse and then a creaking of the mattress and a variety of cracks, as if Ad was stretching. “I’ll be right back.”
As heavy footsteps headed for the other bedroom, Jim didn’t acknowledge the guy’s exit. But when Dog’s muzzle nudged against his bare leg, he looked down.
Big brown eyes stared up out of a face of strawlike fur. “Do you know how to get her out? She doesn’t belong there. She shouldn’t have ended up there.”
Jim took the little whimper to mean the animal agreed—and also needed to go out to use the facilities.
“Two secs,” Jim said, bracing himself to get to his feet. “I need a shower.”
Heaving his deadweight up from the chair, he let the blanket fall from him and went into the modestly sized bathroom. Closing himself in, he flicked on the light, stood over the toilet and wondered whether his cock still worked on any level.
The pink stream he pissed out answered that one. And also suggested that his kidneys had been damaged.
After he was finished, he grunted as he leaned over to hit the flusher and then twisted to the left to turn on the shower. Soap. He needed more soap than the half-used bar that was in there—
Jim froze as he saw himself in the mirror.
Bad. Very bad.
Much worse than he’d thought.
His mouth was purple and swollen from all the shit that had been shoved into it, and his chest and abs were nothing but raw meat. As for his cock . . . The damn thing was hanging off his hips like it had lost the will to live. And he didn’t want to know what the backside of him looked like.
Used and abused was the term.
And his only thought, his only . . . anything . . . was that he hated that Sissy had seen him like this.
As his stomach flopped around in his pelvic girdle, he remembered the horrified expression on her face as she had looked at him. That poor girl . . . He’d been trained for this shit. He’d been through it before—well, not exactly what Devina had done to him, but he’d certainly been worked over a couple of times with fists and knives. Even a bullet or two. But Sissy . . .
He barely made it back to the toilet in time.
As his body clenched up and nothing but bile came out of his mouth, his eyes watered from the strain.
Damn it, Sissy had seen him like this. Sexually violated, bloody, beaten—
More vomiting.
He wasn’t sure exactly when Adrian came in, because round three of heaving hopped up the bunny trail when it dawned on him that he didn’t know whether she was safe from what had been done to him. After all, she was captured. She was stuck there in that hellhole. And Devina had plenty of things that were male-like.
“Here,” Adrian said, passing over a cold washcloth.
Jim couldn’t wipe his face because it hurt too much, so he patted at it, feeling the cool dampness like a balm against his flaming cheeks and burning lips.
Hanging his head, he noticed that he’d left fresh bloodstains on the creamy tile from the wounds that had reopened on his knees.
Yeah, immortal didn’t mean embalmed; that was for sure.
Adrian sat down next to him, his face far too pale as he stared across the toilet seat. “You want me to get you into the shower? That’s what helps me when she . . .”
As their eyes locked, it was survivor-to-survivor.
“Ah, shit . . .” As Jim spoke, his voice was rough and his throat felt like it had been hit with a plumber’s snake. “She saw me like this. Sissy . . . she saw this.”
He couldn’t believe he said it, but keeping that inside was a no-go.
Unable to retain eye contact, Jim squeezed his lids shut and eased back against the flank of the tub. As the water fell like rain in the shower behind him, and the hard floor bit into his ass, he whispered, “She saw me ruined.”
It was the last thing he said before he passed the fuck out.
CHAPTER 37
You wouldn’t have thought that a six-thousand-square-foot town house with three floors—four, if you counted the basement where the wine cellar was—could be cramped as a shoe box.
But as the morning dragged on and bloomed into noon, Grier felt like she couldn’t get enough air . . . or any alone time with Isaac. Her father was a pacing, eagle-eyed presence who seemed to fill every room, even when he wasn’t in it. And Isaac was just as bad, constantly moving around, glancing out windows, going up and back from the front of the house to the kitchen.
By two o’clock, she couldn’t stand it any longer and went to organize her bedroom closet. Which was ridiculous, because it was already tidy—although she found a quick cure for that.
After standing in the middle of the room and doing a three-sixty on the rows of clothes hanging by category, she took each and every blouse, skirt, dress, suit, and pair of slacks off the racks and tossed them into a pile on the floor. Ostensibly, she was reordering the various sections. In reality, she was giving herself a mess to clean up so she could enjoy a slice of control.
Hanger by hanger, item by item, she set about righting her wardrobe.
God . . . Isaac.
If she’d heard him right, down in the kitchen, by the coffeemaker . . . he’d said that he loved her.
Come on . . . of course she’d heard him right. And his incredible eyes had confirmed what her ears had struggled to comprehend.
There were a lot of buts, however, that the lawyer in her wanted to lay out. The thing was, the woman under the attorney-at-law didn’t care about any of that: she felt something equally as strong.
Naturally, logic told her not to trust the emotion in either of their cases, pointing out that it was all a matter of the circumstance, the drama, the tension, the sex—God, the sex. Except her heart had a different theory. She’d felt the spark between them the instant she’d laid eyes on him, and his decision to come forward and do the right thing about his corrupt, dangerous boss . . . well, that was even better than the amazing orgasms.
It made her respect the hell out of him.
As she retrieved one of her black pin-striped suits, she briefly entertained a fantasy where they ended up together on some safe, remote island with nothing but what to have for lunch and dinner to weigh on their minds. The Gilligan’s Island daydream with all its tropical never-going-to-happens was a nice diversion, but she wasn’t fooling herself. Isaac was going to disappear. The government was going to take him and hide him until whatever congressional hearings or judicial procedures rolled out. And if he didn’t end up in jail for war atrocities here in the States, he might well get extradited to some foreign hell.
Which was why he’d said what he had. It was his good-bye.
“Wow.”
Grier spun on her heels, the suit in her hand flaring out in a circle around her body before settling back down—as if it had momentarily forgotten its reserve, only to regain its composure.
And didn’t she know how the damn thing felt.
Isaac cursed himself. “Sorry, I really need to learn how to knock.”
Grier eased up a little. “I’m also jumpy as hell.”
Cocking his brow, he measured the pile in the middle of the creamy carpet. “Lot of clothes.”
“Probably too many. I need to give some to Goodwill.”
He came forward and picked up one of her gowns. It was long and black, like all of them, because she wasn’t a sparkles or color kind of girl. “Where does this go?”
“Ah . . .” There was only one section with the bar set high enough for full-lengths. So she’d dumped them for nothing but a rehang. “There. In the corner, please.”
He carried the evening dress over and set it where it had been. Then he went back for the next one, straightening the padded shoulders on their padded satin seat. Before he put it in place, he surprised her by bending down to put his nose to the neckline.